Quest A brand new system for creating text adventures or interactive fiction
Alex Warren proudly announced yesterday that he was releasing Quest 5.0 out into the wild. My interactive fiction journey this past 10 months has been a rollercoaster of a ride, meanwhile Alex Warren has been equally focused, announcing first the Quest was going to be free and open source and then in April 2011, taking the immensely brave step of quitting his job to work on Quest full-time.
Not only has Quest had a complete makeover from the ground up, Alex has paved the wave for a much greater community input, that includes education. Let’s take a quick look at the highlights;
Easy to write – the visual editor
Designed to be intuitive – everything is shown in plain English, (or English, French, German, Spanish or Dutch and you can even create your own translation.
Games are easier than ever to play and share.
Improved ‘verb’ handle (see Alex’s blog post on Eliminating “Guess the Verb”) and so easy to download and play, even play online.
Powerful
Quest may be easy to learn but do not be fooled, its powerful.
Modern and interactive in the truest sense
Quest games use HTML and Javascript whether they’re being played online or offline, which means they can be integrated with websites, and there is also the potential to create innovative new user interfaces for games. No other system offers this flexibility.
Textadventures.co.uk
From what Alex tells me, there are plans to make the website even more of a community hub; better profiles, editing existing game listings, improvements to categories, easier embedding of games in other websites, game analytics (e.g. what percentage of people complete your game), non-public games and the integration of Quest with e-learning systems such as Moodle? (Slightly influenced).
Download it now and see for yourself.
Behind the scenes
Alex has again widened the community opportunities here (and thanked many of the contributors already) and opened the Issue Tracker so that you can either see what is coming up in the next release or if you wish to contribute. Alex is actively looking for help, so if you have any other suggestions please get in touch.
Alex is a little worried he may be going mad, without a focused business plan and revenue stream (as yet) but I am confident that the community will rally round, that professionals from education and beyond, will see the huge potential of interactive fiction for learning.Of course no donations is too small, and every blog post, retweet and ‘LIKE’ would go amiss.
Keep up to date with Quest
- Join the mailing list for release announcements
- Follow @TextAdv on Twitter for Quest announcements and game releases
- Follow @alexwarren on Twitter for Quest announcements and other thoughts
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Fantastic news about Quest – I’d completely missed this.
Very timley with the references to programming which are in the news.
Indeed Mike, its my ‘quest’ to get it out there and shared with as many teachers and students as possible.
Writing a Moodle course and videos for teachers. Teaching with Quest next year, some how, and then creating learner resources (not much different to the teacher resources I expect). Talking with AQA in an effort to get a qualification that brokers the literacy and programming. Long way to go….